Top 3 Wish-listed Items- Linky Party

Here are my top 3 Wish-listed items in my store- on sale for 28% off during TpT's Cyber Sale.

Are you looking for engaging reading passages to use for Close Reading?  I looked far and wide and decided to create these passages to use with my higher level readers.  Kids love animals so I made a list and asked my husband (who is really a big kid at heart) which animals he would like to read about.    I used his top picks and made challenging yet not too difficult reading passages for my kiddos.  I used them in my reading groups before putting them on TpT.  (After all, if I don't think it's a great product- it's not making it in my store!)

Next we have a great report writing resource that combines learning about farm animals with writing about them.  

I made these to use during our Farm Animal Unit.  

As you know, kids come in all sizes, shapes and levels.  I made this differentiated to scaffold the writing for my struggling students and very open ended for my confident writers.  There are directions for directed drawings of the animals, close reading passages to get information, differentiated rough draft and final copy pages, and so much more.  

These are a great introduction to report writing and research.  

And finally, here is my top wish listed science activity.

These activities are hands-on and really make the kids think.  They are given basic information about pushes, pulls and force and then they are challenged to complete different activities.  

These are perfect for cooperative groups!  Kids really need to work together to problem solve and come up with the solutions.

Click here to take a closer look.

Thanks for stopping by and taking a look at some of my most sought after products.  

Head back to Daisy Designs for more great TpT authors and the fun Linky Party!

Cheryl Irick

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Helping Emergent Writers With Spacing

I love teaching writing to new writers.  It's so fun to watch them move through the writing process.   I've been teaching writing FOREVER so I have a lot of tricks up my sleeve.  One of my "tricks" is Spaghetti and Meatball Spaces.

What are those you ask?  Well, I have cute posters that I hang up in my writing center and sheets that I put in their writing folders to help kids learn how to space letters both in words and between words.
It's a fun recipe for success.  (yeah, I went there)

This is a poster that I put in the writing center

To begin, I use a stick of spaghetti to show how the letters in a word are right next to each other, but they don't actually touch.  These small spaces are called spaghetti spaces.  We then practice spaghetti spaces by writing our names a few times on white boards.  We squish the letters together, we spread the letters out, we use perfect "spaghetti" spacing.  It's a fun mini-lesson.

This is the sheet that I put in their writing folders.

For another mini-lesson, I write a sentence or two with no spaces between the words and I have kids try to read it.  We look for high frequency words, sounds that might make a word, etc.  It's really fun and really tough, but it demonstrates the need for spaces between the words.

Once that the kids understand how important spacing is, I give them their very own Meatball Stick.  They keep this in their writing folders and I have a small basket of them by my small group table.  I show the kids how to place the meatball after a word to help them leave the big (but not too big) space between the words.

These Meatball Sticks are super easy to make.  Just take a box of large craft sticks (tongue depressors) and glue a brown pom pom on the end.  The pom pom is the meatball.

Kids love the novelty of using the Meatball Sticks and find them very helpful when they are learning to write.  I can   quickly remind them to use the Meatball Stick and then they are practicing the skill the entire time they are writing.

You can click on any photo to get these posters for your own classroom.  

Thanks for stopping by!

Leave a Comment Common Core, Writing

Rhyming Fun with Green Eggs and Ham

Rhyming is so important as a pre-reading skill so we work on it a lot in my classroom.  I love March because I love Dr. Seuss.  His books are so engaging for young kids and I love the messages within.  They touch on so many deep concepts and really get discussions flowing.  But that's not the reason for this post (stay focused Cheryl).  

I want to share with you one of my kiddos favorite literacy center activities- my Green Eggs and Ham Rhyming Center.  I call it a center because kids can work independently if they can decode CVC words, but you can also do it as a small group activity (which is what I'm going to do this year with my TK kiddos as many of them aren't decoding yet).  

It's a ton of fun.  Kids use a real spatula to scoop up an egg and place it into a small frying pan.  (I use a small plastic frypan from my kitchen housekeeping center).  They read the word on the egg then look for the ham that rhymes with it.  When they find that, they scoop that ham up with the spatula and place it into the frying pan to "cook."  When the eggs and ham are done cooking, the kids remove them and write the words on the recording sheet.  They can then put those two rhymes aside and start again on a new egg/ham match.

This activity is awesome because they are reading simple CVC words, listening for rhymes (phonemic awareness), and writing!    You can grab this at my TpT store.  It's simple to prep and easy to store.  I keep mine in a gallon ziplock bag.

This is a great activity to have set up when you are cooking green eggs and ham with your class.

Leave a Comment Common Core, Fun Stuff, Literacy Actvities, Literacy Centers, Writing

Spaghetti and Meatball Spaces

I'm blogging over at Teacher Deals and Dollar Steals next week and offering a special deal for only ONE DOLLAR.  But I wanted to offer it early to the followers of my blog.

Are you looking for a fun way to help your new writers use appropriate spacing when writing?  Here is what I use in my classroom- Spaghetti and Meatball Spaces.  It's a guaranteed recipe for success!

I give the kids a real piece of uncooked spaghetti and we use those to leave the small spaces between the letters in a word.  Then I give them a brown fuzzy pom pom to use as the meatball space.  They love rolling the meatball to the next spot.

To demonstrate how important spaces are in a sentence.  I will write one or two sentences on the board without any spaces and we try to read it.  Not very easy to do!  Then we use the meatballs to rewrite it and voila!  

After the lesson, I glue the meatball pom poms to craft sticks and place them in the writing center.  Kids just grab them as needed to use when they write.  

I tell you- spaghetti and meatballs spaces are very easy for them to understand.

Just print the posters and hang them in the room or put them in the kid's writing folders.

So hop on over to my store and grab these now.

Enjoy!

Leave a Comment Teacher Deals and Dollar Steals, Writing

Sight Word Practice

School is right around the corner for me and I'm thinking about fun ways to get my kids reading and writing.  I have a sight word Egg Flip activity that my kids just love but it only has ten sight words.  I have that activity in a center with a real frying pan and spatula and the kids have so much fun cooking up the eggs.  They practice reading the words and writing the words in this center.  You can grab it here for FREE!

I use the Egg Flip Sight Word Center at the beginning of the year.  But what to do when the kids master those ten words?  Hmmm...

Well, since the egg flip is so darn fun, I thought I might as well make a different flip activity with ALL of FRY's 100 sight words, so I made this adorable Sight Word Pancake Flip activity.  Click on the link or click on the photo to get this activity.

The kids are doing essentially the same thing, but this looks different (and we all know how important novelty is for our little learners).  

In this center I have a real spatula, a sturdy paper plastic plate, the recording sheet in a page protector, a dry erase marker, and the pancakes.  That's everything you need for hours of fun!

Kids flip the pancakes (good fine motor development), read the sight words (reading practice), flip the pancake face down and write the sight word on the recording sheet (writing practice), flip the pancake right side up and check the spelling that they wrote (spelling practice), and then scoop the pancake onto the plate and grab a new sight word pancake and begin the process all over again.  Sounds so simple, but the kids are engaged and productive the entire time they are working at that center.  You can pair up two kids- a good reader and an emergent reader so the emergent reader has some support. Feel free to use all the words at once or add them as your readers are introduced to them- you are the teacher so you know what is best for your little learners.

Thanks for stopping by!  You can grab this (and all my products) on SALE TOMORROW and TpT's one day sale.  Don't forget to use the promo code MORE15 to add an extra 10% (I forgot to do that during the last sale- DUH.  I guess I was so excited with all my great purchases, when it came time to check out I COMPLETELY forgot.  Live and learn.  Don't make that mistake- every penny counts, especially at the beginning of the school year!  You can be certain that I won't forget the promo code this Wednesday!

3 comments Fun Stuff, Literacy Actvities, Literacy Centers, Writing

Informational Writing with Kindergartners- Farm Animal Reports

Kindergartners love non-fiction text.  They LOVE learning about animals and can store many facts in their little brains.  They are like fact sponges.

The challenge is how to get all the knowledge from their little brains to the page.  My Farm Animal Report Unit will help with that!

Kindergartners can write reports.  Really!  They just need the structure and the scaffolding to do so.

I'm so pleased with how these reports turned out.  Writing them was so simple and the kids were guided through the process step by step.

Each animal had a Close Read passage and the kids loved underlining, highlighting, and drawing their notes.






To show you how cute my farm animal reports turned out this year,  I just picked one at random and took a photo of each page in the book.

I just love how the directed drawings of the animals turned out.  They look so cute on the page next to the report.

I have a TON of non-fiction books on different farm animals.  We read them ALL when we are studying about the farm and the kids love to find discrepancies among texts.  For instance, many texts say that pigs like to roll in mud, but in reality (as my kids have learned) pigs like to stay cool and prefer to go in clean water, but will resort to mud if that is the best available cooling source.

My kiddos also learned that cows are always female.   You might have already know that fact, but for city folk like us, that was news to most, if not ALL of my kids!   We routinely call all cattle "cows" and sadly, I'm no exception.

It's those fun little facts that spark kid's interest and those are the fact that they include in their reports.  My kids will be taking their reports home tomorrow and are so excited to share them with their parents.

 You can find these in my TpT store.  Just click on this link and it will take you there.

This report was written by a different student, but I just love how the cow is peeking around the barn, so I had to take a picture to show you guys.  Such personality!

I hope you enjoy these as much as I have.  The kids are pretty proud of them too!

1 comment Common Core, Literacy Actvities, Science, Writing

Farm Animal Reports

We have just returned from Spring Break (two weeks!) and are plowing into our Farm Unit.  

We will learn about different animals including horses, cows, pigs, sheep and chickens during this unit.  As we learn about each animal we will write a report.  Our final project will be one big book with a page for each animal.  This is a snapshot of what each page will look like.

We draw the animals on construction paper and then cut them out and mount them on a different color of 12x18 paper next to the final report.

When we are all finished, I will bind them into one large book for each child.

Click on the photo above to get the report, or click on this link.

We take a field trip to our local dairy.  We get to see the cows in their barns, sleeping on their water beds and getting milked in the milking parlor.  The dairy even gives us ice cream as a fun treat.

We will end our study of the farm by having a Rodeo Day where we wrap up the unit.

On this day kids dress in the best western wear and bring their hobby horses to school.  They make and eat chicken scratch by pecking like a chicken -no hands allowed!

They make purple cows- yum!  Have you ever had one?  It's a grape float.

They do barn dancing,  barrel racing,  milk a cow,  rope a steer, help Mrs. Wishy Washy clean mud off of animal (well, chocolate pudding off of animal crackers) and pet small animals in the petting corral.  It's a super fun day.

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